SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

Executives should encourage their staff and provide annual reports to their agency head, on how efficient they are. They should continually be responsible in identifying individuals, programs, etc that could be eliminated or moved to a different area for efficiency. Each year executives have to provide a report on why they should keep their job, so all they do is to "fluf" their work in the office as much as possible... more »

I have spent inordinate amounts of time in making purchases and reconciling my government purchase card. Enormous amounts of time is spent ensuring proper sources are used such as BPA, FSSI, and section 508 compliance. I have had to spend a great deal of time with some vendors that forget and put tax on the order. As a GS13 step 8, I may spend hours trying to get less than a dollars worth of tax refunded. So the government... more »

Stop making nickels and pennies. The production costs of these two coins far outwiegh their usefullness.

There is also a large percentage of these fixed costs that goes to raw materials.

Require all government buildings with yards to use envronmentally friendly landscaping. I have seen green grass on federal building landscaping in dought strcken areas. This must be a huge waste of water. But I have also seen checmicals used to defoliate rocked areas. The right mix is Zeriscape with natural plants and minimize environmental impacts. We need to set an example to our communities

ICE-HSI utilizes a form called an ICE Form 73-293. This form is a 6 page carbon copy document. Currently it is the only form in our agency that requires a typewriter to complete. It is estimated that tens of thousands of these forms are submitted each year. The carbon-copy format also makes mistakes absolute, thus requiring one to waste several forms before submitting a final copy. A portion of this form also has... more »

The Hearing Reporters are contracted to record the hearings which determine whether claimants are disabled. They are paid for each hearing when testimony is taken and usually end up doing between 6-8 hearings a day. Over the course of an entire week the cost paid to these individuals adds up.

Rather than pay the contracted Hearing Reporters, it would benefit the Agency to have the Legal Assistants or the Case Technicians... more »

The government should create “Federal Work Centers” that are non-agency-specific, located throughout Maryland, Virginia and DC. These government office buildings would provide work-spaces for the thousands of Federal employees who do not specifically need to work at their agency’s headquarters. Federal Work Centers would save money by enabling government employees to work at locations within 2 or 3 miles from their... more »

Over the past few months, we have been working on becoming more efficient with incoming faxes throughout CBP & Border Patrol. We receive at our port of entry on a daily basis on average 50-100 vehicle export faxes per day, sometimes one fax can include up to 20 pages. Our main focus was on vehicle exports and trying to figure out how to get reduce the receiving so much paper, wasting ink, and phone lines for something... more »

When a piece of legislation is brought before a legislative body (either the House or the Senate), it is nothing short of bribery to vote swap (i.e., I'll vote for your bill if you vote for mine; or I'll vote for your bill if you give my district X dollars via an unrelated amendment).

Two rules could fix this:
1) No off-the-record conversations about pending legislation (ex parte communication). It is simply unfair... more »

There are numerous similar suggestions on the website. Recommend they be consolidated and as long as they are not an exact copy of someone else's both individuals should receive appropriate credit or the earliest one gets the credit. The problem is that the duplicates are watering down the voting. Three similar suggestions may have 15, 8, and 10 votes - where if they were one it would have 33 votes. Future events... more »

Currently the Director of National Intelligence has less power and authority than the former Director of Central Intelligence had. This needs to change if the office is going to have any effective control over the Intelligence Community.

Staff should receive promotions in-house whenever possible. This would elimate the several thousand dollars spent on moving a promoted person to their next assignment. In-house promotions are common place in many state agencies and have negligible negative impact on their upward advancement. House hunting trips, moving costs, lodging and additional funds needed to move a person across the country are saved. It is... more »

Government Maintenance Contracts are usually awarded to large corporations. I propose the idea that you merge these contractors with an in-house work force. My idea is to NOT award to large contractors but to increase the in-house facility management and Performance Assessment employees to oversee a contractor that does Preventive Maintenance work only. Reward the contractor for exceptional Preventive Maintenance performance... more »

The government has begun encouraging unscheduled telework during bad winter weather. They should also encourage unscheduled telework on days when hot weather/bad air is deemed unsafe. This would relieve burden on the roads and public transport systems, as well as on staff. It might reduce adsenteeism/leave taken.

There should be a way for term people to convert to permanent people based on performance. If a person is fully successful in their position, and the agency wants to hire a permanent person for that position there should be a way to convert the term person. It is extremely inefficient for the government to spend time and resources processing a new job advertisement, holding interviews, processing a new candidate for the... more »